"STRANGE TRIP" HIGH-QUALITY

          One of the best bands ever formed now has one of the best documentaries ever made.
          Long Strange Trip, the Grateful Dead story, features never-before-seen footage from prime Dead years, new interviews with band members, family, and crew, and fascinating insights on the group's driving force, Jerry Garcia.
          The nearly four-hour experience available online consists of six episodes of varying length and a bonus feature, beginning with Act I - "It's Alive" which starts with Jerry talking about how as a kid the Frankenstein monster used to scare him. For him, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) was a transformative experience because he saw that scary things, weird things, were fun.
          Sometime in his teens Jerry heard the 5-string banjo of Earl Skruggs and it changed his life. He spent all his time practicing "conversational music" where "the instruments kind of talk to each other."
          Around this time Jerry met a fellow singer and musician Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and then they met another, Bob Weir. Jerry decided that as much as he loved banjo, he needed to unlearn everything and pick up an electric guitar. Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart rounded out a band composed of members fusing diverse styles. And they happened to have a genius lyricist in one Robert Hunter.
          Also at this time Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was tooling around by bus with a bunch of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters and experimenting on their own with a strange new drug which the government was investigating as potential for a weapon. So the band made friends with him right away.
          The film manages to present the psychedelic phenomenon wholeheartedly embraced by the Grateful Dead at the time without either glorifying or condemning. We simply see what happened.
          More than any other band, the Dead represent the freewheeling spirit of the '60s. Many people changed their lives from whatever they were doing to follow the Dead and form a psychedelic carnival wherever they go. They are called Deadheads. No Rolling Stonesheads. No Whoheads. Just Deadheads.
          Interestingly, it is a hallmark of the band that they saw no difference between themselves and their fans. Yet somehow, out of all the chaos, they made it big on their own terms. All they really wanted to do was escape mind-numbing conformity and survive by playing music. True, the band also aspired to advance the human race a step by finding joy in the present through the freedom of self-expression and getting loaded. But when the groovy Hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco turned into tour buses carting uptight straights pointing with horn-rim glasses, cameras, and brochures, the Hippies glanced aghast and politely headed north.
          Long Strange Trip is a magic carpet ride to that time. A fascinating documentary about more than only one band, it's a trip so well worth taking, it might just change your life.


LONG STRANGE TRIP
Starring Jerry Garcia,
Phil Lesh,
Bob Weir,
Ron McKernan,
Bill Kreutzmann,
Mickey Hart,
Robert Hunter,
Donna Godchaux
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev
Runtime 238 minutes
Rated R




Stewart Kirby writes for